Forecaster's Evaluation of The Integrated Turbulence Forecast Algorithm (itfa)

Abstract

Aviation forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Aviation Weather Center (AWC) and United Airlines (UAL) participated in a subjective evaluation of automated turbulence forecasts during the period 23 January through 1 April 2003. The forecasts were generated by the Integrated Turbulence Forecast Algorithm (ITFA) know operationally as the Graphical Turbulence Guidance (GTG). ITFA was developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and uses Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) grids along with a suite of algorithm diagnostics and observations to produce turbulence forecasts (Sharman et al., 1999). The subjective evaluations were gathered via an electronic questionnaire, similar to those used for evaluations in previous years (Mahoney et al., 2002). Corresponding objective verification scores are generated and displayed through the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) Real-Time Verification System (RTVS) that can be accessed at http://www-ad.fsl.noaa.gov/fvb/rtvs/. This paper will not present details on the ongoing objective verification of aviation impact variables. That can be found at Brown et al. (2002). Section 2 will provide a brief summary of the winter 2003 subjective evaluation. More details about that evaluation can be found in Kelsch et al. (2003). Section 3 will present a comparison between the objective verification scores and the subjective evaluations of ITFA. Section 4 provides a summary.